Archive for January, 2010

On January the 12th a key post was published on The Official Google Blog. As a new year response from Google to the ever-existed reserves about its censorship policies abroad, its title said it all: a new approach to China.
The article informed that Google’s corporate infrastructure was stricken by a targeted attack originating from China. According to the American press, multiple attacks were coming from Taiwan, which is a quite usual practice for Chinese hackers.
In response to this attack, Google reacted very firmly: “we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China”.
That way Google, a company present on the stock exchange, not an international institution, issues maybe the most relevant challenge ever directed to the Chinese government and its doubtful practices, dealing with human rights.

Dan Lockton’s research is about design intended to influence users’ behaviour; he called it “Design with Intent”. The whole theme is interesting in terms of sustainable design, both for what concerns inducted responsibile behaviours and the transmission of knowledge itself; sure it will be deepened in further posts.
Here, a couple of specific articles are presented as an example of approch to Design with Intent.

Open IO is a free public resource for estimating the sustainability of products and services. The data available on the website have been developed for everyone to use for any purpose and at no cost.
The team from Open IO welcomes others to join their community: “Collaboration with companies and researchers in new data development efforts are our cup of tea and we would also love to hear your feedback. Our model is built for continual improvement and we will keep working hard to enhance our resources that aim to provide the public with the best available free, open and transparent sustainability related information possible”.
Also, data are (almost) ready to be imported into openLCA (and SimaPro, which on his turn is neither free, nor open source) to be used as a Life Cycle Library.

EcoMo09 is an event which took place in London the past September, 11th at 6:00 PM to 12th at 6:00 PM. It was open to all software developers who wanted to have a positive impact on society and the environment. Wi-Fi and power on location were provided, while laptops, software development kits and any other tools were to be brought by the participants.
Vodafone and Betavine organized the event, a 24-hour dev camp competition. Workshops on environmental data sources took place during the event, and developers used their “green” coding skills to create prototype software tools to help people reduce their impact on the environment. EcoMo09 was also intended to offer opportunities to socialise, collaborate and network with code peers.

On the cover of Wired n.10 (December 2009) there’s a quotation from Shirin Ebadi: “io nomino Internet patrimonio dell’umanità” (I designate Internet heritage of humanity). It’s the sentence which opens an issue of Wired Italia, entirely written around their proposal of the Web as a candidate to the Nobel Prize for Peace 2010.

A few days ago I got an email from Greenpeace “Cool IT” campaign’s team; the mail reported some thoughts about COP15, the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference which took place in Copenhagen from the 7th to the 18th of December, 2009. Such thoughts are presented from the IT point of view, saying how it could help cutting CO2 emissions. Beyond the bitter conclusions about the poor outcomes, the “Cool IT” team invites ICT companies to plan new policies, to be presented at the next summit, Mexico 1010.
I thought it would be nice to share.